10 People Who Changed The Comic Book Industry Forever

6. The British Invasion (Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman Et Al.)

When you think of the 'British Invasion', chances are your mind falls to the sixties, Beatlemania, or maybe the Brit-Pop resurgence of the mid-to-late nineties. For comics however, there was another British Invasion - one decidedly more wild.

Led by the likes of Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Jamie Delano and Peter Milligan, the British Invasion of comics marked a period where those writers, all having previously worked at 2000 AD at some point, made the jump to DC in the early eighties. Moore himself first made waves on Swamp Thing before going on to pen what many would consider to be the finest comic of our time in Watchmen, while Morrison, Gaiman and Delano divided their time between Vertigo - with books like Sandman, Hellblazer and Animal Man - and DC.

Yes, they're not all one person, and they all contributed to the medium in their own way, but - both as a collective and as an event - the British Invasion marked a watershed moment in the medium. It'd be remarkably unfair to attribute the entire movement's effect to any sole writer, and while there are certainly creators in there who could claim to boast a bigger influence, it was this group in particular that affected real change in the eighties.

Plus, y'know, there's no way we're choosing between Watchmen, Hellblazer and Sandman. Not now, not ever.